I am planning to attend a conference on "Islam and the Media" organized by The Center for Media, Religion and Culture School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Colorado, Boulder, in January 2010. Here's the abstract. Inputs are welcome.
ABSTRACT
Islam has been reported by major international media with constant stereotypes where Islam equals to several keywords, such as Osama bin Laden, terrorism, fundamentalism, Israel-Palestinian conflict, and other notions that are unfavorable for Islam. The powerful international media have imposed these ideas repeatedly throughout the world which brings about appalling unprecedented repercussion, including in Southeast Asia. This paper is to discuss about the imbalance of the media control and news flows by international media which results in the subjugation of Southeast Asian media and the consequence it has brought about. Powerless Southeast Asian media, partly due to the lack of resources, have passed these “Western” conceptions about Islam with hegemonic tendency, leaving Muslim audience in the region cannot but consume, and to some extent, accept, what has been conceived by the international media. Muslim-majority Indonesia and Malaysia will become the focus of the study, where international news about Islam in both countries, produced by international news agencies, have continuously become the prime sources of information. This study will look at how these international media frame a certain news story about Islam as well as what possibly prompt them to apply these editorial policies. The study will also look at the possibility of Southeast Asian media to produce their own news stories about Islam -- for example, by setting up an independent news consortium -- by looking at the effectiveness of the existing news organizations in Asia.
A Roman Catholic church dome with Spanish architecture, Manila, May 2011.
On the blog
This blog is to record all of my published writings, compile them in digital form so that it is easy to retrieve. A Southeast Asianist with current research focus on media, pop culture and modernity, now I am affiliated with Leiden University's Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. However, my research interests range from Philosophy, Literature, Political Science to the Media.
